A week is a long time in politics climate science: Nonsense debunked in WaPo, begininngs of recovery in the ozone hole, revisiting the instrumental record constraints on climate sensitivity…
Lots of lessons there.
Usual rules apply.
Climate science from climate scientists...
“And now—we are in an emergency situation. We can no longer pretend that our normal system and timelines of government are adequate to meet the moment. The window for gradualism has closed. We are out of time. Business as usual politics, irresponsible mainstream media coverage and a distracted citizenry will result in catastrophic consequences.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/07/19/beyond-paris-finding-courage-face-climate-emergency
Even considering climate as an emergency is heretical. If the President or any top government official even postulated such we would see markets roil.
But I think it is scientifically accurate to point out that the window for gradualism has closed:
The old Kyoto-era language postulated a necessary emission reduction of around 80% by 2050 to have a reasonable chance of staying under 2C. By the time of the Paris COP the carbon budget science – if not the conservative IPCC projections now compromised with BECCS, etc – emission reduction reality was now focused upon reduction by 2030 because at the rate of present emissions the carbon budget to stay under 2C would all be used up by around 2040. Since Paris this 2C carbon budget has also been shrinking due to new climate science.
Last year McGlade and Ekins published a paper detailing which present fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground in order for human caused warming to stay under the internationally agreed precautionary ceiling of a 2C rise from pre-industrial levels. In order to have just a 50/50 chance of staying under 2C, a third of oil reserves, half of natural gas and 80% of coal must remain in the ground. Canada’s oilsands where singled out: production must be reduced to negligible levels after 2020.
McGlade and Ekins based their calculations on a global carbon budget of 1,100Gt that could still be burned without producing enough CO2 greenhouse gas (GHG) to exceed 2C. Recent advances in the carbon budget science over the past year have now shrunk this budget to now much less than 1000 Gt, to somewhere closer to 600-800Gt.
The Rogelj et el paper is the main paper quantifying this lower carbon budget but the budget is shrinking because the climate science is also getting much more dire. For only one example, a recent paper studying clouds strongly suggests that climate sensitivity has been underestimated which would shrink the carbon budget further. A new paper on terrestrial sinks will soon be published predicting that we must factor in increasing carbon going to the atmosphere. Not only does this mean that we can put less carbon into the atmosphere to stay relatively safe from humanity threatening ‘dangerous climate change’, but the shrinking carbon budget also means we have far less time to reduce our emissions.
If we are serious about mitigating climate change to protect all we know and love, to protect our kid’s very future, the possibility of a future, the up to date carbon budget now requires something like an 80-100% emission reduction by 2030.
Nearly a decade ago Gore and co organized meetings to get key members of the public up to speed on climate. Isn’t it now time for an org (not suffering from credibility cowardice)to organize meetings with legislators and biz leaders to consider ‘Does climate change now require emergency action?’
Sidd: “This is cool.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/kelp_seagrass_slow_ocean_acidification_netarts/3013/”
cool, but only local (you won’t be able to scale it up to slow down the acidification globally) and even locally it is limited:
– more kelp -> more nutrients taken up by kelp -> less nutrients left for phytoplankton -> less food for the oysters.
For corals it may not be as bad, since they primarily rely on their photosynthetic symbionts, but the caveat is that the kelp has to grow _adjacent to the corals, but not among them (if they grow on the same plot they would compete for light). And even then – the questions is: for how long can you sustain the _continuously increasing biomass of kelp_ (the moment kelp runs out of space or nutrients to further increase in biomass, its acidity buffering ability instantly disappears and the water rapidly acidifies to the levels seen in places without kelp).
Hank R: ‘oogled: No results found for “f bird printer”
AJ: I believe he’s talking about that amazingly annoying and HUGE 5-box advertisement that RealClimate decided to add to every page. f=facebook, bird=twitter, printer=print, envelope=email, and +=more commercial crap. (I’ve never clicked on any of them, so this is just speculation.)
I could understand an OPTION to engage in such commercial activity, but to force it down our throats seems wrong. I changed my preferences to show the dock on the side instead of the bottom and the crass commercialism followed along to the side, where it doesn’t usually interfere.
RC, PLEASE give us the option to not support these companies!
@nemesis. It is all very well for you to go after oil companies such as Exon etc. but consider the alternative.
Without fossil fuelled energy few of those commenting here would still be alive. All modern advances in medical, and other life enhancing technologies are the result of the availability of energy supplied by fossil fuels. How can you possibly slam the very reason you are able to comment here on the internet or keep your family safe in the cold winter seasons by demonising the very industry that makes this possible. Let us be honest here, wind and solar just cannot cut it, can they?
When push comes to shove and if,big if, there is finally real evidence that CO2 is the demon as advertised then nuclear is the only option except that you lot do not like that either do you?.
“AJ: I believe he’s talking about that amazingly annoying and HUGE 5-box advertisement that RealClimate decided to add to every page. f=facebook, bird=twitter, printer=print, envelope=email, and +=more commercial crap. (I’ve never clicked on any of them, so this is just speculation.)”
It’s a share (media) bar, not an ad. That is, it’s not an inducement to pay to use something; it’s simply a portal to allow you to do something with the content of the RC page you’re reading. And they aren’t all ‘commercial’ in any sense–eg., ‘print.’
Also, on my screen it’s far from ‘huge’ or ‘annoying’; just a reasonably discreet vertical bar way off to the right. I’d never really paid it any attention till this discussion came up.
“I could understand an OPTION to engage in such commercial activity, but to force it down our throats seems wrong.”
Odd. By ignoring it, I thought I’d pretty much succeeding in avoiding any ‘forcing’.
“I changed my preferences to show the dock on the side instead of the bottom and the crass commercialism followed along to the side, where it doesn’t usually interfere.”
Maybe you should give Ed the details of how you did that? Sounds like he’d appreciate it. Off to the right is apparently the default on my setup.
“RC, PLEASE give us the option to not support these companies!”
Like your printer? This isn’t an ad, so no revenue accrues by simply having the bar there. You’ve got to actually click on a particular corporate logo to ‘support’ them by actually using their services (and thereby being exposed to actual ads.) Since you say you’ve never done that, you aren’t ‘supporting.’
Lastly, making it easy to share content from RC ‘supports’ RC’s educational mission. Or so I would have thought.
for CO2 enthusiasts: no response from CO2.earth folks yet about scripps v. noaa number comparison.
IB at 135: I have taken note. I appreciate the link and graphs and like that you understand the treasure hunt nature of this type of project for a “citizen scientist.”
Daily CO2
July 20, 2016: 403.20 ppm at MLO (pretty hard fall! is that a quick loss of the 1.5 El Nino bump? or daily noise? trend has been down and more quick than I had charted, so maybe that’s encouraging? had one day near 400 ppm, but so noisy, who knows what that means, but trend is down, not just the seasonal, there is more going on here and that is probably loss of EN bump)
July 20, 2015: no reading (no success with the treasure hunt on noaa for an easy way to punch in a date and find the daily average for CO2. That makes sense with such a noisy number)
June CO2
June 2016: 406.81 ppm
June 2015: 402.80 ppm
I think I will switch to tracking weekly and monthly numbers for a variety of reasons:
1. less work
2. easier to find the number
3. apples to apples with what appears to consistent use of NOAA data set
weekly in that format is:
Last Week
July 10 – 16, 2016 404.48 ppm
July 10 – 16, 2015 401.67 ppm (2.81 ppm increase)
MAR – if you have a minute to check that CO2.earth is doing apples to apples on weekly number, I would appreciate it. I think that is the case, but I missed the NOAA v. Scripps issue, so I would like to working with steady numbers that don’t have extra wobble driven by using separate data sets. Who needs that?
Warm regards
Mike
Albert J, please calm down. I’ve been reading this blog for years, and don’t notice those boxes, which no one could legitimately call “huge”, much less “HUGE”, in my browser’s display (YMMV). Kinda makes me think the problem isn’t located where you think it is. (Try a mirror.)
AJ:153:” that amazingly annoying and HUGE 5-box advertisement […]f=facebook, bird=twitter, printer=print, envelope=email, and +=more commercial crap […] but to force it down our throats seems wrong. […] RC, PLEASE give us the option to not support these companies!”
I’d suggest we keep our outrage for the more deserving targets. Your “amazing annoying HUGENESS” may be in the eye (or the screen setting) of the beholder, as on my screen all five icons take perhaps 2% of the screen, a narrow strip at the right edge I have never even noticed until your post … ;-), and completely absent once I get into pop-up window through which I typically read the posts.
Maybe on your screen the things look completely different, but on my
end it all looks like trying to kill a mosquito with a moral outrage (“forcing down our throats”, “crass commercialism”) cannon.
For Hank, AJ and anyone else who’s annoyed by intrusive social-media links on web pages: try an “ad blocker” add-on to your browser. I’m using “uBlock Origin” (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin) with firefox.
Bill Henderson #151
In Climate Change Network Dr Rogerj is quoted as saying
Differences between carbon budget estimates unravelled by Rogerl et al. in Nature Climate Change considers the effect of other green house gasses (e.g. Methane) as well as CO2. The abstract says
It may be even worse than that because of missing feedbacks. Recently, Dr Rogerj emailed me after I had asked about the missing feedbacks in the CMIP5 climate models that the now-defunct UK Department of Energy and Climate Change has recently conformed. Dr Rogelj said
There is also an interesting paper by McDougall et el. Sensitivity of carbon budgets to permafrost carbon feedbacks and non-CO2 forcings
Even if the feedbacks are no big deal, it all looks rather terrifying.
What do you all think about the super “heat dome” in the US now, which I believe is caused by Rossby waves, which I believe acc to cutting-edge research are being intensified and made to last longer and/or more frequent due to climate change (that extra energy in the climate system).
That’s not visible with any of three browsers I’ve tried on my Mac.
Anybody else who sees it or not may comment, you need more information than just what you see.
I suggest you try a different browser, after running your anti-malware and anti-adware search.
You do have tools running on your computer to detect, and to prevent, adware infestations?
http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
https://www.malwarebytes.com/
And/or go to a friend’s house and use their computer and browser.
See if you can narrow it down to something that appears only to you.
Ice sheet deglaciation and methane emissions, with the scope on Greenland’s melt season
Greenland’s melt, what does it mean for future atmospheric methane?
http://climatestate.com/2016/07/21/ice-sheet-deglaciation-and-methane-emissions-with-the-scope-on-greenlands-melt-season/
“ These suits should serve as a siren in every corporate board room, that if any company engages in this type of calculated and systematic illegality, we will bring the full force of the law — ”
AJ: Total crap. Until the INDIVIDUALS are prosecuted, stripped of their wealth, and sent to prison for decades, it’s ludicrous to think that anything will change. Without that, it’s all just risk/benefit analysis, and in that realm, lying and polluting will ALWAYS win out. But if YOU will go to prison for the rest of your life, THEN you’d actually do the right thing….
Remember, many, many, many companies did exactly what Volkswagen did and paid peanuts. PERSONAL jeopardy is the ONLY thing that will stop the evil.
> icons for facebook, twitter, print, email, share with other social media
Oh, got it, I had to turn off my adblocker (uBlock Origin) to see them.
UblockOrigin’s “hide element” allows blocking them individually or as a group.
try filtering “addthis.com” with NoScript or uBlock Origin
addthis.com page says:
Regarding the f-bird printer thing:
Albert Jones says:
RC, PLEASE give us the option to not support these companies!
Albert, et al, those buttons aren’t support for the companies, they’re ways to get RC posts into social media. IE, click on the ‘f’ to post a story on facebook.
Facebook doesn’t get any revenue from the button being there, and making it easy to move the story into facebook in a place where more people will see it seems like a good thing to me.
Don’t use the option if you don’t like it, but please don’t ask the hosts who are doing everything they can to communicate climate change science not to use every available tool to do so.
The next big thing on climate communication is Climate Wars Pokemon Go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/opinion/a-coolant-that-threatens-to-heat-up-the-climate.html
Re: #151, Bill Henderson, #84 (my previous comment)
Thanks Bill for your thoughts on our present climate situation requiring emergency action. You seem to be thinking along the lines of a fast shrinking “carbon budget” that would give us a 50% chance of staying under 2C warming.
So, is that a consensus view? Do we have to wait until around 2040, when we’ll have exhausted this carbon budget (and we’ll be around 480ppm atmospheric CO2 by then, and no summer Arctic ice), for the UN to declare a global climate emergency?
And what are we going to do then that we should not be doing right now?
My real question is, why aren’t most climate scientists declaring a climate emergency right now, in 2016? Is it just because it’s politically incorrect to state that we are in the midst of a climate emergency, with 25% on the corals in the Great Barrier Reef dying within the span of a few weeks? How would the US government react if 25% of the trees in North America died within a couple of months?
Last post by Gavin: May 7, 2016
Last post by Mike Mann: June 7, 2016
Last post by Rasmus: May 22, 2016
Last post by Stefan: May 19, 2016
Last post by Eric: Nov 10, 2015
Last post by David: Feb 6, 2016
This site has really gone pretty quiet. I am sure the contributors are quite busy. To a layperson or citizen scientist, it seems like there is a lot of interesting climate stuff going on with Greenland melt, heat waves, tundra burning, sea ice loss, Amazon drying, changes in natural carbon sinks on a warmed planet, etc. that might prompt regular postings to share highly informed and educated readings on how things are going, but maybe it’s all overblown and over-projected. Knowledgeable republicans who read this site say the concerns are overblown, the science is over-projected and the exaggerations are what is driving global warming skepticism. (paraphrasing boomerangs JS at #161)
Carbon emissions are reported to be falling, there is some discussion about how the global economy is becoming less energy-intensive. Maybe it’s all a wash and there is just nothing to say about the climate these days?
Cheers,
Mike
response from CO2.earth re CO2 readings:
Hi Mike – there were a few days that updates did not get made. I’m working on school work and for now doing the bare minimum with updates. I’m not happy about the misses.
As for the daily comparison data, I repost the most current and comparable data from the Mauna Loa Observatory. I’ll explain. There are two, independent monitoring programs at MLO (Scripps and NOAA) so the location is the same. The monitoring equipment and monitoring scientists are different and, data is reported using different 24-hour periods (one is based on Hawaii local and the other is based on a time zone in continental USA). I’d say the year-over year comparison of Scripps vs. NOAA is unconventional scientifically, but it’s the best available published daily data and serves a great educational purpose which is the intended point. It lets people look at the daily readings (and hourly values in charts that are published by NOAA and Scripps) behind the weekly, monthly, annual averages. It lets people see the degree of variability on the shorter time scales. It puts people more in direct contact with the atmospheric readings as they are posted. It’s worth adding that no scientific claims are made at CO2.earth on the data which, after all, is preliminary and subject to quality control checks by NOAA and Scripps. CO2.earth reposts and redistributes the data to help raise the profile of this important holistic indicator of planetary change (or planetary stability, whichever way you want to look at it). It’s a real time indicator and the comparisons with last year (or the prior decade) say something important on their own about the changes in the composition of the atmosphere that can easily be understood. There is no need for statistical analysis. To dive deeper into issues like the influence of El Nino, that info is available elsewhere (although some links are provided at CO2.earth). Further CO2.earth reposts the data for multiple mean values and the CO2_earth twitter feed reposts the NOAA charts (which show up on the CO2.earth webpages.). To get to your question more directly, I would suggest that short term differences is probably not going to say very much. Compare the monthly or annual averages—things like time zone difference essentially become a non-significant factor. Hope that helps. I think “apples” to “apples” is appropriate. Keep in mind that if you pick all the apples on a tree, no one apple will be exactly the same—but they are have the constitution of an apple.
mw 154: All modern advances in medical, and other life enhancing technologies are the result of the availability of energy supplied by fossil fuels.
BPL: Nonsense. Neither vaccination nor germ theory required fossil-fuel based energy.
mw: How can you possibly slam the very reason you are able to comment here on the internet or keep your family safe in the cold winter seasons by demonising the very industry that makes this possible. Let us be honest here, wind and solar just cannot cut it, can they?
BPL: Why not?
mw: When push comes to shove and if,big if, there is finally real evidence that CO2 is the demon as advertised
BPL: There has been good evidence for that for a long, long time. Crack a book, okay?
mw: then nuclear is the only option except that you lot do not like that either do you?.
BPL: Not particularly, since it’s expensive, dangerous, and slow to deploy.
#154–mikeworst:
Yes, *let’s* be honest. If wind and solar ‘cannot cut it,’ then why has the bulk of added generation capacity in recent years been wind and solar.
David Miller and Hank R, thanks for the info. My comment was too frustrated.
mikeworst @154
I’m sure most visitors to this website are well aware that it is only through exploitation of fossil fuels that our civilization has achieved such great heights. However, many are also aware that continuing to burn fossil fuels will be the downfall of that same civilization. That is exactly the problem.
And why do you doubt the role of carbon dioxide? Most of us here trust the world’s climate scientists to know their business. If they tell us continuing to burn fossil fuel is a problem, we accept their findings. And some of us, myself included, have gone to the trouble of educating ourselves about the basics of climate science. The physics is not so difficult as to prohibit an understanding of the essentials. And when one does understand the essentials, it becomes obvious that carbon dioxide really is “the demon”.
As for nuclear power coming to the rescue, that is debatable. The moderators don’t like us to get side-tracked by that issue, but I will say that from what I’ve seen, nuclear power helps but suffers from the same limitations as renewable sources of energy — not enough.
I would sum up as follows: To avoid a climate catastrophe we need to decarbonize our civilization, but doing so would — probably — have disastrous consequences for our civilization. We are between the devil and the deep blue sea. The cure is almost as bad as the sickness.
Finally, why some of us revile Exxon so much is because they knew about the problem three decades ago, but instead of helping us decarbonize at a much less painful rate, they instead embarked on a campaign of climate disinformation in order to safeguard their wealth and power. They won’t suffer the consequences of their deceit, but their grandchildren will.
Mike @156,
The weekly data at CO2.earth is straight from the NOAA monthly data so no mixing of data sets involved.
Further to my blather @137,
Discussing the effects of calculating the yearly CO2 rise averaged over various length-of-period while mixing NOAA & Scripps MLO data – this is something that can easily get overly complex for a comment thread. Sadly, I managed to blunder somewhat @137 which will not help. In looking to find the lion’s share of the effects of mixing the two data values* within the differences of monthly average annual rises, I thought I had it sorted. But what I had managed to see as that lion’s share, in truth was just another hungry lion joining the feast.
That is, the average difference for the daily comparisons requires a +0.30ppm value to reconcile the data differences, but what I was actually looking at was a monthly -0.30ppm value.
A graph of the differences in the monthly MLO CO2 data from NOAA & Scripps is here (Usually 2 clicks to ‘download your data’). The July 2015 data point of -0.30ppm is quite visible.
The monthly data shown in the graph gives an s.d. of 0.2ppm. The weekly data (not graphed) has twice the spread with s.d = 0.4ppm. Annual data (calendar year) s.d. = 0.1ppm.
Any further consideration of the lion’s share of the difference between those data sets examined @137* will remain speculative without a source of Scripps daily data. Possible sources of this ‘lion’s share’ that come to mind include () The effect of dropping different numbers of day within the record () Different methods used to calculate the means when there are missing days. (Both Jul 2015 & Jul 2016 were at the high end for missing days).
If calculation of annual CO2 rise is restricted to comparisons within a single record, there are differences between the NOAA & Scripps records. They give a scatter with an s.d. of 0.5ppm for averaged weekly data & 0.08ppm for calendar year average, this annual value being markedly greater for the early years (0.93ppm sd 1976-1995 & 0.55ppm,sd 1996-2015).
These differences between NOAA/Scripps have been used to assess the accuracy of the NOAA CO2 annual rise data. NOAA say:-
* Those values tabulated @128 with a couple of extra daily comparisons from co2.earth when averaged remain markedly at odds with the weekly/monthly data published by NOAA & Scripps.
@mikeworst, #154
“It is all very well for you to go after oil companies such as Exon etc. but consider the alternative.
Without fossil fuelled energy few of those commenting here would still be alive. All modern advances in medical, and other life enhancing technologies are the result of the availability of energy supplied by fossil fuels. How can you possibly slam the very reason you are able to comment here on the internet or keep your family safe in the cold winter seasons by demonising the very industry that makes this possible. Let us be honest here, wind and solar just cannot cut it, can they?
When push comes to shove and if,big if, there is finally real evidence that CO2 is the demon as advertised then nuclear is the only option except that you lot do not like that either do you?”
Have you ever heard about massive, criminal denial, lies and (ongoing!) distortion of the fossil fuel industry for many decades? ONE thing for sure:
Not just the global population will pay for that denial, big business and the children of the fossil moneymakers will pay too^^ I call that JUSTICE. Either the law or life punishes lies, denial, ignorance^^ No doubt about that, right?
Have (no!) fun:
” Exxon’s Climate Cover-Up Just Got Bigger: Docs Suggest All Major Oil Giants Have Lied Since 1970s”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrc7PTTw1lU
Please explain that your children (I have none^^), please explain that to the future generation, who are not even born yet, so THEY, the coming generations, did NO harm whatsoever.
Learn about the OIL INDUSTRY, fashism and the Nazis:
” The history of the last century is the history of oil. Due in part to catastrophes like the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez on March 24th 1989 and the recent increase in reporting on Global Warming, by now most people are at least passively aware of the environmental dangers involved with the world’s dependency on oil. According to Project Underground, the California based industry watchdog, petroleum exploration currently threatens old growth frontier forests in 22 countries, coral reefs in 38 countries, and mangroves in 46 countries. Keep in mind that this is just what is being destroyed while these corporate giants look for future sites to exploit. Given the incredible danger this industry represents to humanity, one might ask what kind of people would continue to push the world into ever greater use of petroleum products while simultaneously thwarting efforts to develop alternatives such as renewable energy sources. Well would it be any surprise that they would be the same type of people that would actively collaborate with the Nazis and the Japanese fascists during the second world war, or the types of people who today would employ military death squads against peaceful protesters? This space is far to short to give even a superficial introduction to the history of back room deals with dictators, violence, murder, and genocide which is synonymous with the history of oil, but just to illustrate my point I will briefly discuss some of the lower points in the history of Standard Oil and its progeny.
The Standard Oil Trust was dissolved under court order in 1911 creating many smaller regional companies, including Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Standard Oil of New York (Mobil), Standard Oil of California (Chevron), Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio), Standard Oil of Indiana (Amoco), Continental Oil (Conoco), and Atlantic Oil (ARCO). By 1941 Standard Oil of New Jersey was the largest oil company in the world, controlling 84 percent of the U.S. petroleum market. Its bank was Chase and its owners were the Rockefellers. J.D. Rockefeller had always argued that two things were essential to the oil industry’s survival: checking “ruinous competition” and “cooperation.” Given the success of his monopoly at making enormous profits for its investors while at the same time destroying any form of competition and keeping prices artificially high, it seems quite clear whose survival he was really talking about.
After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical company. This investment was part of a pattern of reciprocal investments between the U.S. and Germany during the Nazi years. During the Great Depression, Germany was viewed as a hot area in which to invest….”
http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v13/3/oil.html
Now go on defending criminal fossil fuel industry, if you want to.
@mikeworst, #157
See, Exxon allies cry “fowl!” over law firm in climate probe, just like you do in your reply to me:
” 23.7.2016 – Exxon allies cry foul over law firm in climate probe”
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/288924-exxon-allies-cry-foul-over-law-firm-in-climate-probe
Robert Scribbler site is alive and covering a lot of current stuff on global warming. Good post on heat wave:
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/07/22/from-the-arctic-to-africa-to-the-amazon-more-concerning-signs-of-earth-carbon-store-instability/
Last Week
July 17 – 23, 2016 403.39 ppm
July 17 – 23, 2015 400.96 ppm (2.43 ppm increase pretty noisy number)
I think my July projection of 405.3 is looking high.
Warm regards
Mike
Oops.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/climate-change-the-third-pole-under-threat/7657672?WT.tsrc=Facebook
Crisis on high
By China correspondent Matthew Carney, photography by Wayne McAllister
Updated July 26, 2016 00:08:45
#154, mikeworst:
“Without fossil fueled energy few of those commenting here would still be alive. All modern advances in medical, and other life enhancing technologies are the result of the availability of energy supplied by fossil fuels.”
False. Most of the big gains in life expectancy were accomplished by public health programs (clean water, sewerage, etc.) that required little if any fossil fuel energy. The most fundamental life-enhancing technologies (e.g. bicycles) require little if any fossil fuel energy, while the worst life-destroying technologies (e.g. automobiles) are highly FF-dependent. The Green Revolution, and industrial agriculture in general, are highly FF-dependent, but numerous and much less energy-intensive agroecological alternatives exist for food production. And so on, down the line. Our actual FF requirement, to maintain decent living standards for all, is surely an order of magnitude lower than current levels of consumption.
Of course, the fossil fuel industry, and indeed the whole hyper-financialized neoliberal order, would LOVE for you to believe that we all owe our lives and health to their dirty schemes and technologies. It is a myth that they have cultivated over the decades, and many of us buy-in to it. Sadly.
mikeworst:
“Let us be honest here, wind and solar just cannot cut it, can they?”
They could VERY EASILY cut it if WE could “cut it”, i.e. if we could cut our consumption profile down to something reasonable, say ~15-20% of current consumption. (Yes, I know, that’s not going to happen.) Even without drastically reduced consumption, they can cut it, over decades, combined with other renewables and a whole lot of energy efficiency. No need for nuclear — which is unaffordable, anyway. It is fossil fuels and nuclear that “just cannot cut it”, for a variety of reasons.
“if we could cut our consumption profile down to something reasonable, say ~15-20% of current consumption.” – 183
CO2 production needs to fall 90% not 15% to 20%.
” ‘We have not come across anything like this before.'”
http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casestudy/news/n0681-now-the-proof-permafrost-bubbles-are-leaking-methane-200-times-above-the-norm/
Mother Earth got flatulence…
Mikeworst at 154 says:
“Without fossil fuelled energy few of those commenting here would still be alive. All modern advances in medical, and other life enhancing technologies are the result of the availability of energy supplied by fossil fuels.”
Not really. Most advances in science and technology result from hard work in the laboratory. Many key advances were made early in the industrial revolution before coal or oil were widely used. The best you can say is fossil fuels sped up the process and helped the results have wider application in the population, but clearly all the same advances are possible with alternative energy sources. The exception might be things like plastics made from fossil fuels, but nobody really disputes oil will continue to have applications like this.
Nuclear power may suit some countries. I don’t think you can assume that just because somebody thinks we are altering the climate they oppose nuclear power. However it is expensive, and my country has plenty of better alternatives.
The rest of your comments are trolling, and so not worth responding to.
182
Pole proliferation again?
The discovery of the East Magnetic pole was announced in Geophysical Journal International two years ago.
Mike Worst@154,
What I see in your post are a lot of assertions backed up by a complete lack of evidence. But, then, when the evidence is against you, it makes it kind of hard to cite it in support of your thesis.
There is plenty of evidence that solar and wind will be a big part of the solution–supplemented by other technologies. Whether nukes will be part of that mix is still to be determined. To date, they haven’t shown much promise, and there is still the question of what to do with the waste.
I think at some level, the ease of producing energy with fossil fuels may have actually retarded growth of better and cleaner technologies.
The case against the Exx-Mob and other fossil fuel companies is one of securities law–did they knowingly mislead shareholders about the implications of climate change for their business? Period. It is a question of law, not of justice.
The question of their liability for the losses many will suffer due to their dishonesty is one to be considered in later legal action.
#184, Vendicar–All other things being equal, cutting ‘consumption’ *to* 15-20% should reduce emissions *by* 80-85%.
Ray Ladbury, responding to Mike Worst:
We’re so glad you could join us, Mike Worst ;^). I don’t need to repeat what other commenters have said, but only Ray has hinted at the economic root of the problem. Mike, have you heard the phrase “tragedy of the commons”? Where Ray wrote ‘ease’, read ‘low price’. The prices we’ve been paying for energy from fossil fuels haven’t included the costs of climate change, caused (there’s really no reasonable doubt) by releasing carbon back to the atmosphere from geologic sequestration. Left to itself, the “free market” will never internalize the costs of AGW: thus, AGW is a tragedy of the global climate commons.
Tragedies of the commons can only be averted by cooperation among the exploiters of the common-property resource, in this case the Earth’s climate. For example, American voters could instruct our legislators to enact a carbon tax, to send ourselves a reminder about AGW in the form of a price signal; and to raise the price of fossil fuels to where carbon-neutral energy sources are competitive. That would harness market forces to drive development and build-out of wind, solar, biomass, tidal, etc. until they “cut it”. Nuclear may have a place in the mix, too, at least early in the transition.
Yes, Americans have enjoyed the benefit of “cheap” energy in fossil carbon. Now we know it wasn’t so cheap after all. Fortunately, there are lots of other relatively inexpensive energy sources we can use instead, if we just cooperate a little.
Hat tip to Nemesis above in this thread
Dang.
This advisory should be on top of any climate news article from now on:
” We’ve applied to change “Flash Flood Warning” to “Natural Selection Advisory” since nobody with a car seems to listen or even care anymore.”
https://twitter.com/NWSPodunk/status/757591483037978629
Says it all. Mother Nature always says it plain and clear, no bullshit, no doublethink, no doublespeak ever. I love Mother Nature.
forecast says three months of above-average temperature:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/warmer-temps-favored-across-entire-us-20561
“For the next three months, above-normal temperatures are favored across the U.S., from coast to coast and Mexico to Canada, as well as Alaska, according to government forecasts.
In archives that go back to 1995, that’s never happened, Dan Collins, a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, said.”
It’s just three months of hot weather tacked on to the last 13 or 14 months of hot weather. Is this a big deal?
Warm regards
Mike
Thanks for your positive comments back Geoff and Andrew. I’m going to steal and use your barrier reef analogy Andrew. The Rogerj info was very much appreciated Geoff – I didn’t know if I’d mis-read the paper and with the maybe accelerating feedback produced GHGs really rather terrifying.
Don’t know if it was this thread but somebody commented about Michael Mann’s aerosol science informed suggestion that to stay under 2C we had to stay under 405ppm. The text I posted up above was reused from some text that included Mann’s contention as well as several other pertinent perspectives:
“(B)ut I think, considering Geden, Mann and Spratt, and maybe more importantly, Hansen’s reasoning that even a 1C rise is too deep into dangerous climate change territory, that the IPCC carbon budget is far too conservative in what scale of emission reduction is needed urgently and that hence you greatly over-estimate both how much time is left for emission reduction and the efficacy of only relying upon market mechanisms.”
(Geden http://www.nature.com/news/policy-climate-advisers-must-maintain-integrity-1.17468
Mann http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-will-cross-the-climate-danger-threshold-by-2036/
Spratt It’s time to “Do the math’ again which isn’t up at the moment???
Hansen http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf )
Plus Rogerj and other new science – rather terrifying.
How about in Canada where I live a new and earnest Trudeau government says they are serious about mitigating climate change – all the language – but presently look like each of the last five Canadian governments who said they were serious but set emission reduction targets that even if met wouldn’t do our part to stay under 2C and then didn’t even try to meet these targets and failed miserably. The Trudeau government won’t come close to meeting the 30% of 2005 levels by 2030 old Harper government target. We need 80-100% by 2030.
Is this not an emergency? There is no hope of meaningful emission reduction without emergency government.
HadCRUT have posted for June with the (yawn) warmest June on record (which is the 14th warmest-such-month in a row), an anomaly of +0.737ºC which is an increase on May’s anomaly. The first 6 months of 2016 average +0.90ºC which compares with +0.75ºC average for the present record for a full calendar year – 2015. Thus for 2016 to gain warmest year on record, the last 6 months of the year must average above +0.6ºC. The last time a final half of a year failed to be so warm was all the way back in 2014 which suggests something about the confidence expressed for 2016 gaining that “schorchyissimo!!” status.
In the table below, all 18 months are in the top 30 warmest months with only 2 not in the top 20. (The missing 5 months of the top 20 occurred during the 2006/07, the 2002 & the 1998 El Ninos.)
2015.. 1 … +0.688ºC … 19th
2015.. 2 … +0.660ºC … 27th
2015.. 3 … +0.681ºC . =20th
2015.. 4 … +0.656ºC … 29th
2015.. 5 … +0.696ºC . =17th
2015.. 6 … +0.730ºC … 13th
2015.. 7 … +0.696ºC . =17th
2015.. 8 … +0.732ºC … 12th
2015.. 9 … +0.784ºC …. 9th
2015. 10 … +0.820ºC … 7th
2015. 11 … +0.810ºC … 8th
2015. 12 … +1.010ºC … 3rd
2016.. 1 … +0.908ºC … 5th
2016.. 2 … +1.061ºC … 2nd
2016.. 3 … +1.063ºC … 1st
2016.. 4 … +0.922ºC … 4th
2016.. 5 … +0.681ºC . =20th
2016.. 6 … +0.737ºC … 11th
Just an observation on Mike Worst’s statement that
“Without fossil fuelled energy few of those commenting here would still be alive.”
It is more correct to say that few of those commenting would ever have been born. And then we would have to ask: Why would that be a Bad Thing? (Nothing personal folks.)
We tend to forget that much of what makes life comfortable today was developed with a much much smaller population. Coal certainly helped in speeding up science and technology through the beginning of the 20th century, but at that point, we could have done just fine without petroleum products like gasoline and diesel; electricity and x-rays and antibiotics and computers and so on would still have developed. What we probably wouldn’t have done is triple (? or quadruple?) the population. And even if we were still generating electricity with coal for a population under two billions, we wouldn’t be in this pickle, would we. It would be pretty easy to fix the damage we have done.
Mal Adapted: Yes, Americans have enjoyed the benefit of “cheap” energy in fossil carbon. Now we know it wasn’t so cheap after all.
AJ: I wonder when we’ll cross the line to where fossil fuels have cumulatively cost us more in damage than they’ve saved us in low cost? In any case, we’re talking about the future, not the present/past. Some of the comments seem analogous to, “Without spears and bows-and-arrows, you’d never have been born. In fact, the human race might have died off! Thus, we MUST use spears tomorrow!” Dudes, it’s IRRELEVANT whether fossil fuels were productive all the way up to this very moment. Only ten years from now counts. (It will take us ten years to ramp up whatever we do or don’t)
———
BPL, the US military decided that a triad was reasonable during the Cold War. Two things can fail, but all three at once is less likely. Of course, four or five is even better, especially when it comes to zero-carbon, since sources aren’t binary. That wind farm might be putting out 25% or 100%. As you have studied electrical supply, you know that “base-load” is critical. And there is only one zero carbon option that is exactly suited for base-load. (Other than special cases, where a natural resource is abundant and constant, such as Niagara Falls.) I won’t talk about n-word building here, but I will say that it’s pure-t-stupid to decommission any reasonably safe n-word power station if there is a fossil fuel power station within the same electrical district. Germany is a good cautionary tale. Decommissioning n-words and ramping up dirty brown coal ate lots and lots of German treasure but didn’t help a whit carbon-wise. They increased their emissions 1% in 2015.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/03/14/german-co2-emissions-rise-10-million-tonnes-in-2015/
———–
Mike: It’s just three months of hot weather tacked on to the last 13 or 14 months of hot weather. Is this a big deal?
AJ: YES! The warmer the weather in the US and the more the Arctic sea ice melts, the more votes for sanity in November. Three months is almost exactly the amount of hot and melty weather we need! Hopefully, folks in the northern tier will be voting in shorts…
Last Week
July 17 – 23, 2016 403.39 ppm 1 Year Ago
July 17 – 23, 2015 400.96 ppm (2.43 ppm in pretty noisy number)
AJ 197: thanks for your thoughts on that. I agree with you, but RL is my go-to guy on heat waves, so have to wait to hear from Ray.
Warm regards,
Mike
AJ: As you have studied electrical supply, you know that “base-load” is critical.
BPL: I know that “base-load” is a meme fossil-fuel and nuke fans use to claim nuclear and wind can never cut it. Sorry, I disagree.
@alfred jones 197
“you know that base load is critical”
I don’t. In fact, I have yet to find anyone able to tell me what the “baseload” of my house is. Why don’t you enlighten me. I am pretty capable with watts and volts and that kind of physics stuff, so don’t be afraid that you will confuse me:
What is the baseload of my house? Just an approximation, based on a typical modest home, would be sufficient.